Abstract

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four women academics. What follows is an attempt at describing an arts-based project, emerging from concentrated efforts to develop an approach to collaborative scholarship aimed at identifying and inhabiting the divides rather than only navigating around, over or under them.